I used to go to two forums for Windows development discussion or looking for help. They are MSDN forums and stackoverflow.com. I can't say which one is better than the other. They are both helpful depending on your question. Here is my experience with tow forum community.

MSDN Forums:

MSDN forums are sponsored by Microsoft. They are all about Microsoft Windows development. Some forums are very active, for example, IE browser extension development forum. Usually questions are answered very quickly after posted. The answer's quality usually is good if it is not too tricky hard. Most of time, there are some MVPs taking care of forum and answering questions.

Statckoverflow.com

Statckoverflow was started by Joel Spolsky. This site is for any kind of development discussion. I would say this site is the most active development forums I ever seen. You can always get answer for development questions. Even though some answers are not what you need. They still shed light on you for further investigation.

Friday, March 27, 2009

Two years ago, I developed two desktop tools and sell them online. I published them on many popular software listing web sites. After several months, the sale amount is almost nothing. Then I cut the sales price and waited for a couple of months. The situation was not improved too much. The total downloads was good. But the sales did not grow. I did not know what was wrong with it. Not counting on earning money from the two software any more, I listed them as freeware.

A couple of months ago, one of my friends talked about getting money from ad-supported freeware. He introduced younexus.com, an advertising company to me. The service Younexus provides is very similar with Google Adsense. In a different way, they put ads within software GUIs, not on web sites. Software authors can earn money through ads. This just fits the requirement of freeware authors like me. I double checked with Younexus, they provide clean and safe advertising. If no harm to my software, and no need to worry about ads inventory, why not have a try? Then I registered as a Younexus publisher member and started show ads on my software GUI automatically through Younexus Ads pool.

As a surprise, what I like the best of Younexus is the by-product - software usage trace function. Before, I can only know my software total downloads from software listing web sites, I cannot get further information about software usage. Younexus provides very detailed software usage statistic data daily. Now I can see very clear not only the total downloads, but also how many times my software are actually used everyday. I found the actual usage percentage is low among the total downloads. I saw that my software still has room to improve. I upgrade software with some improvements and continue tracing the usage. Now the situation gets better. So, the usage data give me clear marketing information. I know how to improve my software now.

So far, the income through this channel is not big yet, but growing. But I am more confident than before on improving my software to become popular by using the usage data as feedback. This let me regain the enthusiasm to develop more useful and more popular software tools.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

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